Round Rock Edition | September 2024

Education

BY HANNAH NORTON

Bob Popinski discusses Texas public school funding challenges Amid high operating costs and stagnant state funding, public school districts across Texas have adopted budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2024-25. Last year, public education advocates urged law- makers to increase the basic allotment—which is the base amount of money schools receive per student annually and has not changed since 2019, when it was raised to $6,160. Community Impact interviewed Bob Popinski, the senior policy director for education policy nonprofit Raise Your Hand Texas, to learn more. How are Texas public schools funded? Right now, Texas is in the bottom 10 [states] for per-student funding. We’re more than $4,000 below the national average, according to a new National Education Association report.

[Texas uses] what is known as an equalized system, where the Legislature sets the amount of per-student funding and a district is guaranteed that amount. [District] revenue comes from local property taxes and general revenue from the state. On average, when you look at per-student fund- ing across the state, the funding that actually gets down into the classrooms—that pays for day-to-day operations like teachers and cafeteria workers and bus drivers and school principals—is roughly $10,000 per student, on average, across the state. Why are so many districts facing high budget shortfalls? Since 2019, the last time we saw any increase to our school funding formulas, inflation has gone up 22%. School districts are operating at roughly a $1,400 deficit from where they were in 2019. When you look at the basic allotment—[which is] kind of the building block for our school funding formula—it’s at $6,160, and that hasn’t been updated since 2019. Federal stimulus funding is ending. And school districts knew that, ... but it doesn’t mean that

were about 24 recommendations in there. A lot of them focused on salary; a lot focused on training and retention of teachers. School districts are struggling to find certified teachers. In the 2022-23 school year, approxi- mately 15,300 teachers were hired in Texas with- out certification. That’s a drastic increase, about a 650% increase, from 2010. And it’s especially acute in rural and small towns, where nearly 75% of teachers were uncertified. Research shows [hiring uncertified teachers] can have negative consequences on academic achieve- ment. If you have a new teacher that doesn’t have the skills to be ready on day one, obviously your kids aren’t going to be achieving where you want them to be. It’s also causing high turnover. Only about 37% of uncertified teachers are still teaching after five years.

the post-pandemic student achievement loss has gone away. There’s still a lot of programs that are in place to help students with their academic progress that school districts would like to con- tinue, but because that federal stimulus funding is going away, it may not be available to them. In addition to those two major driving factors, there are some school districts out there experi- encing enrollment decline. Think of it this way: if every student draws down about $10,000 to pay for teachers, and you lose 10 kids, that is $100,000 that the school district doesn’t have to pay for a teacher salary. But you still have to have a teacher in the classroom, and you still have to have a bus driver, and you still have to be able to turn the lights and the air conditioning on. So those are big, kind of fixed costs that a school district doesn’t necessarily control. What kind of staffing issues are schools facing, and what can the state do to help? The state needs to implement a lot of the recom- mendations that came from the Teacher Vacancy Task Force report that was issued last year. There

Per-student spending On average, Texas public school districts spent $13,109 per student for the 2022-23 school year. Texas ranks 44th for per-student expenditures out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Arkansas

$13,516

#42

Alabama

$13,484

#43

Texas

$13,109

#44

Arizona

$12,837

#45

Florida

$12,815

#46

Tennessee

$12,476

#47

Nevada

$12,246

#48

Oklahoma

$11,928

#49

Utah

$11,146

#50

#51 Idaho

$9,808

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version, visit communityimpact.com .

The national average for per-student expenditures is $17,493 annually.

COURTESY RAISE YOUR HAND TEXAS

SOURCE: NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION/COMMUNITY IMPACT

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